p Communism is a classless society of social equality. This equality is achieved gradually by erasing the essential distinctions between the workers and the collective farmers, and also between the two latter classes and the intelligentsia.

Let us first deal with the eradication of class distinctions. Insofar as the basic indication of a class is its attitude to ownership, a necessary condition for erasing the distinction between the workers and the collective farmers is the elimination of the distinction between state or public ownership, with which the working class is linked up, and co-operative-collective-farm ownership, with which the collective farmers are associated, and the merging of these two forms of ownership into a single people’s ownership.